Mike McCarthy didn't like the Green Bay Packers' start last year and hated even more to see the way the season almost fell apart because of a second injury epidemic in three years.

The Packers finished 11-5, won the NFC North and won a playoff game, but the team McCarthy expected to be coaching at the end of last season never materialized.

And so McCarthy spent a good portion of this off-season meeting with his coaches to figure out how they can avoid the pitfalls that made it an unfulfilling season.

"To me I always look for that point in training camp where my team starts going," McCarthy said this week at the NFL owners meetings. "And we didn't have that this year. I'm not blaming it on the off-season. I don't know.

"We had that point in camp with injuries. We didn't start fast. I'm not talking about our record, I'm talking about quality of play. Our quality of play was not what it needed to be the first four weeks."

Nor was it what he hoped the final four weeks.

The team plugged holes with young players when the injuries hit, got healthy late in the year and then stalled in the playoffs. A pair of duds against Minnesota and San Francisco were simply leftover DNA of an uneven season.

In 2012, 29 players missed at least one game due to injury and two years before that, 31 missed at least game. The 2010 team overcame them because few were to critical players, but last year starters missed a whopping 93 games.

Why those numbers are so high remains a bit of a mystery, but McCarthy and his medical and training staffs have been studying the data and considering some changes to how they do things.